Tootfinder

Sometimes I understand why people design new standards or formats when the existing ones can’t be extended (whether due to practical constraints, authority, or bureaucracy) or simply aren’t flexible enough to evolve. I think the XKCD comic doesn’t include that aspect.
And yes, maybe new standards will appear.
#nocontext

Day 2 of #freesoftwareadvent I use digikam for most photo management; and also it's sibling showfoto. digikam has a load of different photo tools, from the simple colour fixes, un-distortion etc - and simple album management - all the way up to some very fancy tools. It does the download from phone or camera great. showfoto is most of the basic tools but setup generally for …

An unusable weapon
The Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation heavy-duty ICBM,
capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads,
a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Russia’s spa…

The missile meant to strike fear in Russia’s enemies fails once again
One of Vladimir Putin’s favorite sabres to rattle seems to have lost its edge.

@… Ich denke, es geht nicht einmal darum, etwas konkretes zu erreichen, sondern es ist rein symbolisch: «wir zeigen den linksgrünversifften städtern, wo der hammer hängt». Deswegen gehen sachargumente auch völlig ins lehre.

@… Ich denke, es geht nicht einmal darum, etwas konkretes zu erreichen, sondern es ist rein symbolisch: «wir zeigen den linksgrünversifften städtern, wo der hammer hängt». Deswegen gehen sachargumente auch völlig ins lehre.

Dual-Mode Magnetic Continuum Robot for Targeted Drug Delivery
Wendu Zhang, Heng Wang, Shuangyi Wang, Yuanrui Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01761 https://

Dual-Mode Magnetic Continuum Robot for Targeted Drug Delivery
Magnetic continuum robots (MCRs) enable minimally invasive navigation through tortuous anatomical channels, yet axially magnetized designs have largely been limited to bending-only motion. To expand deformation capabilities, this paper presents a simple assembly that embeds permanent magnets radially within the catheter wall, allowing a single externally steered permanent magnet to independently induce either bending or torsion. A physics-based formulation together with finite-element analysis …

Sources: Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe for around $1B; Observe has raised more than $470M (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/snowflake-talks-buy-app-monitoring-startup-observe…

Snowflake in Talks to Buy App Monitoring Startup Observe Inc. For Around $1 Billion
Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe Inc. for around $1 billion, which would likely be the biggest deal in Snowflake’s history, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Observe, based in San Mateo, Calif., sells so-called observability tools that help ...

Improving Survival Models in Healthcare by Balancing Imbalanced Cohorts: A Novel Approach
Catherine Ning, Dimitris Bertsimas, Johan Gagni\`ere, Stefan Buettner, Per Eystein Loenning, Hideo Baba, Itaru Endo, Georgios Stasinos, Richard Burkhart, Federico N. Auecio, Felix Balzer, Cornelis Verhoef, Martin E. Kreis, Georgios Antonios Margonis
https://

Improving Survival Models in Healthcare by Balancing Imbalanced Cohorts: A Novel Approach
We explore whether survival model performance in underrepresented high- and low-risk subgroups - regions of the prognostic spectrum where clinical decisions are most consequential - can be improved through targeted restructuring of the training dataset. Rather than modifying model architecture, we propose a novel risk-stratified sampling method that addresses imbalances in prognostic subgroup density to support more reliable learning in underrepresented tail strata. We introduce a novel methodo…

Just finished "It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth" by Zoe Thorogood.
CW: Frank/graphic discussion of suicide and depression (not in this post but in the book).
It feels a bit wrong to simply give it my review here as I would another graphic memoir, because it's much more personal and less consensual than the usual. It feels less like Thorogood has invited us into her life than like she was forced to put her life on display in order to survive, and while I selfishly like to read into the book that she benefited in some way from the process, she's honest about how tenuous and sometimes false that claim can be. Knowing what I've learned from this book about Thorogood's life and demons, I don't want her to feel the mortification of being perceived by me, and so perhaps the best thing I could do is to simply unread the book and pull it back out of my memories.
I did not find Thorogood's life relatable, nor pitiable (although my instinct bends in that direction), but instead sacred and unknowable. I suspect that her writing and drawing has helped others in similar circumstances, but she leaves me with no illusion that this fact brings her any form of peace or joy. I wonder what she would feel reading "Lab Girl" or "The Deep Dark," but she has been honest enough to convey that such speculation on my part is a bit intrusive.
I guess the one other thing I have to say: Zoe Thorogood has through artistic perseverance developed an awe-inspiring mastery of the comic medium, from panel composition, through to page layout and writing. This book wields both Truth and Beauty.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Contrastive Representation Regularization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Taeyoung Kim, Jimin Lee, Myungkyu Koo, Dongyoung Kim, Kyungmin Lee, Changyeon Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01711

Contrastive Representation Regularization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown its capabilities in robot manipulation by leveraging rich representations from pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, their representations arguably remain suboptimal, lacking sensitivity to robotic signals such as control actions and proprioceptive states. To address the issue, we introduce Robot State-aware Contrastive Loss (RS-CL), a simple and effective representation regularization for VLA models, designed to bridge the gap betwee…